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China UnionPay Data Services Co, Ltd., a subsidiary of China UnionPay, launched an interbank system where cardholders can exchange bonus points from among any of the banks they do business with to select the rewards they want. The project is based on XingChain, a blockchain platform of Gingkoo. Gingkoo is the youngest listed fintech company of NEEQ (National Equities Exchange and Quotations) in China, focusing on fintech products and financial software.

The system has been adopted by several banks on a trail basis. If all goes well, it will be widely applied in point redemption, making it the very first blockchain-based business platform that has been officially announced into large-scale application.

It happens to a lot of cardholders that they don’t want to redeem gifts at bank A while they have no enough points for right gifts at bank B.

“In 2015, the loyalty points of Bank of China amounts to RMB 40 billion while only 50% of them has been redeemed. It would be prohibitively complex and costly using conventional technology for such a system where cardholders can redeem the right gifts among different banks, the cost is about RMB 100 million . With blockchain, we could save this investment,” said Yan Xiangxiang, chief research officer of National Engineering Lab for blockchain.

Last September, IBM and China UnionPay E-payment Research Institute demonstrated what this new industry pilot for blockchain technology was all about at Shanghai International Blockchain Week.

Li Tao, deputy chief R&D engineer of UnionPay Data added that:

“Unlike centralized database, this cutting-edge technology can make the exchange of bonus points more transparent and traceable, which would reduce maintenance cost of the system and thus improve work efficiency.”